Biggest Risks of Adopting DevOps

iLAB

DevOps has become a gold standard in the world of software development. While it may be an effective workflow for those coding and creating new applications, its efficacy wanes when it comes to the process of quality assurance testing. Though there are issues to all organizational approaches, there tends to be an idea that DevOps is some sort of magic bullet delivered to solve all your problems in one swoop. In reality, unless you have a real need for constant iteration, you may not need to go fully into DevOps But here at iLAB, we don’t want to make unfounded claims. Here are our reasons why adopting DevOps could be a risky move for your business.

Adopting DevOps is a Huge Change

It’s dangerous to minimize how radical of a change the adoption of DevOps is for any software company. DevOps means continuous integration and delivery, which will force your employees to adjust to a complete overhaul of how they work. Introducing tons of new processes like code sprints and feedback loops could pose challenges to the culture of product development you already have in place. There’s also a need for a lot of time when it comes to a DevOps transition. At iLAB, we have seen large organizations go through this process and have it take up to five years. Does your company have that much time on its hands? The answer is probably, definitely not.

DevOps Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Greater Quality

A big selling point of a DevOps transition is that it will improve both the efficiency of the work process and the quality of the product. However, DevOps is also about speed and agility, about delivering products at a near-constant speed and deploying updates at every turn. This might be ideal for a smaller company, but large enterprises have massive software environments, with dozens – if not hundreds – of linked applications and configurations. Introducing a DevOps framework into a complex ecosystem like this simply changes the risk model for the organization, particularly that there is a greater chance for errors or oversight. The process also tends to minimize the importance of an independent quality assurance testing team, as it asks developers to do much of the QA work during code sprints.

Changing for the Good, or For the Worse?

It’s understandable to want your company or enterprise to be up to speed with the times. Businesses adopt new tools and processes as an attempt to both improve their own work, as well as get a leg up on their competitors. But jumping on the DevOps bandwagon and completely restarting your workflow from scratch might be putting the proverbial carriage before the horse (or, wagon in this case). Bear in mind, people have done these jobs for decades without any major issues. Not everything is a disaster, and not everything old or trusted is bad. Some products just don’t have that much of a need for constant iteration, so why risk changing everything about how you develop software for such a small reward? There is a huge difference in keeping something current and completely replacing it. It might even make more sense to integrate elements of DevOps before trashing your entire process and adopting an entirely new setup.

Quality assurance is a complex and vital part of any development workflow. Whether you’re choosing to stick with your current set up or implement elements of a DevOps production chain, you’ll need trusted QA engineers to ensure your applications are running smoothly. That’s where iLAB comes in. We are global leaders in quality assurance testing, no matter what your setup looks like. Contact us today to learn more.